Part Thirteen of The Sensational Shrimpleton Saga: Enter Freddy `Fearless’ Fazackerley.

In the last instalment of the Soap Opera nobody else has apparently thought of so far, intrepid Private Investigator Threefeet of the Yard – a.k.a. James Churchill Proudfoot – was busy trying to make an impression on an Irishman with a long ginger pony tail in a massive mansion somewhere in Buckinghamshire.

We leave them there for now and rejoin a Peeress of the Realm on her very posh yacht.

It could be found somewhere just off the Welsh coast as it made its way down the western side of the Principality on its way south.

With her in her luxurious boat was a large Sikh: the brother of Ranjit Singh `Chopper’ Chopra – the leader of the elusive Khalistan Warriors themselves – Baban, who was not just Director of Communications for this group but also for the football club they owned: Shrimpleton Town.

Baban’s presence was not so much remarkable as miraculous – given that he had appeared to have died on the yacht from a heart attack just a few hours previously.

This was after being abducted during a meeting of the Shrimpies Trust ­at the biggest pub on Cumberside Island, the Shrimpleton Arms.

Lady Lynne Shrimpleton was newly showered and looking casually – and apparently effortlessly – stunning as she sat at a table in the main cabin. Across the table from her – also freshly showered and looking unrecognisable from the night before – Baban Singh Chopra was drinking coffee and nibbling the occasional biscuit.

Lynne was staring with barely concealed glee at a news report from the BBC on a laptop in front of her.

“Read this!” she said to her Sikh guest, and pushed the computer over to him.

Baban started to read, a look of consternation growing so quickly on his face that Lynne – remembering what had happened just a few hours previously – started to worry that the big man might suffer a relapse.

This is what he saw on the screen:

“The UK has today announced an asset freeze and director disqualification against Baban Singh Chopra who is suspected of belonging to organisations involved in terrorism in India. HM Treasury has also announced an asset freeze against a group, Babbar Akali Lehar, for promoting and supporting the same terrorist group.”

“All funds and economic resources in the UK owned, held or controlled by Baban Singh Chopra are now subject to an asset freeze. These designations will prevent all UK persons and entities from dealing with any funds or economic resources owned, held or controlled by either Baban Singh Chopra or Babbar Akali Lehar; or making funds, economic resources and financial services available to or for their benefit. This includes any of the entities they own or control, without a licence from HM Treasury or an applicable exception.”

“Baban Singh Chopra is also subject to director disqualification sanctions which prohibit him from acting as a director of a company or directly or indirectly taking part in or being concerned in the promotion, formation or management of a company.”

“Baban Singh Chopra is known to have been the Director of Communications of a conglomerate registered in the United Kingdom as Khalistan Warriors PLC. HM Treasury urgently requests said conglomerate to contact them immediately and directly to ensure that similar sanctions are not taken against their Public Liability Company and its directors.”

“I don’t understand this!” said Baban eventually in his slow but perfect English. “Of course I have links to what the British government calls terrorist groups in the Punjab – all Khalistan nationalists do. But why choose me for this treatment?”

“It’s a trap!” Lynne replied, thrilled by her own ingenuity in setting it in the first place. “I said it’s amazing what you can do if you have the right connections in this wonderful British democracy of theirs! I rang their so-called Chief Secretary of the Treasury from this boat last night. Forgive me for using a Moslem analogy but I take the view that if we can’t travel to Mohammed’s mountain because we don’t know where it is, we must make Mohammed come to us! The only evidence we have been able to find of the very elusive Khalistan Warriors, is you, isn’t it? But if you choose not to co-operate with us; your colleagues will have to contact the Treasury when they see this, won’t they? Then an arm of His Majesty’s government will find them for us, won’t it?”

Baban stared at her for an extremely long moment and then decided to choose his words very carefully. He realised that he was effectively the prisoner of this extraordinarily beautiful and resourceful woman and he really didn’t want to upset her – for his own sake at least.

“You are a very lovely lady” he said. “But there is more to life than what we can see on the surface. You need to look deeper. You need to understand what you are dealing with. My colleagues will not contact the British Treasury in any circumstances. I could tell you whatever you want to know about the Khalistan Warriors – or even my brother Ranjit right here and now. But it won’t help you. We – they – are one step ahead of the curve. All of us. Sorry – all of them at all times. The Warriors always have had – what is the word? – contingencies! My disappearance will make them change everything. Phone numbers; email accounts – all contact details will be scrapped and new ones created. It has probably already happened. That is Standard Operating Procedure. So what I could tell you about them is already out of date. They know that I have gone missing. They have planned for this, believe me. Best Case Scenario is that the kidnappers want a deal: me for whatever it is you are looking for.”

“We want Simran as a swap.”

“Simran?” Baban stared at Lady Lynne in utter astonishment as this information sank in. She couldn’t possibly be serious – could she? Finally, he asked:

“Are you insane?”

The big Sikh continued to stare at Lady Lynne as if he still couldn’t believe what she had just told him.

“Do you genuinely think that my colleagues in the Khalistan Warriors would consider for even one moment swapping a fat, old, expendable man with heart trouble for their greatest-ever asset? If you do, you’ve made an enormous mistake! Simran is the very last thing they will swap for anything! They know where their bread is buttered! What are you thinking of?”

He paused, if only to log the doubt which had suddenly clouded Lynne’s extraordinarily lovely eyes.

“If the boot was on the other foot, would you expect anyone to swap someone like me for a woman with your exceptionally good looks who is a Peeress of the Realm and appears regularly in glossy magazines all over Britain?”

He paused and looked at that very Peeress of the Realm as she seemed to belatedly begin to appreciate the utter absurdity of this proposal.

Finally, he continued:

“Would you do a deal in these circumstances? Of course you wouldn’t! Neither will they! Ring them if you doubt it: I can give you Ranjit’s personal number and he will tell you so himself. I am disposable – almost everyone in the Khalistan Warriors is. The Worst Case Scenario is that they will assume that I’ve done a runner and gone to ground somewhere. The Warriors might decide that I’ve double-crossed them. In that case, I am as good as dead already!”

For the first time, the normally unshakeably confident Lady Lynne Shrimpleton actually wondered if she had made a really big strategic blunder by kidnapping the elderly Sikh.

She thought about this for a while as they sat together in the main cabin of her yacht. Then she nodded at Baban and returned to her bedroom towards the back of the boat in order to arrange everything she had just heard in her head in a proper order so that she could work out what to do next.

As she saw it in the cold light of day, the men known to us as Four and Nine had kidnapped a huge guy with a bright red turban that might as well have been a flashing beacon wrapped around his head in front of witnesses last night.

Lots of witnesses.

They had done this in a place – Cumberside Island – where even an idiot would realise that an event like this was not exactly a daily occurrence.

The Shrimpleton Town fans who had witnessed the dirty deed – like Four and Nine themselves – had probably never even seen a Sikh before. And they were unlikely to forget one as striking as Baban was to look at in a hurry – given his appropriately elephantine size; wild beard, hair and bright red turban – were they?

What Lynne needed to do, she very belatedly realised, was to try and redeem at least something worth having from the wreckage of the plan which she had personally orchestrated so far.  

She had got her hands on Baban as intended – but at what cost?

She inwardly cringed as she anticipated the videos – and the endless speculation about them – which social media channels would be awash with before the day was out. A few had already appeared and she had viewed them avidly.

What she saw confirmed what she expected. She was confident that all the usual inane speculation and half-baked explanations of what had happened – and why – would be way off the mark. The cretins posting this sort of stuff were exactly that in her opinion – cretins. This sort of rubbish – usually totally mis-spelt and lacking any discernible punctuation in the way of creatures like these all over the world – was their Mating Call to other cretins in her very experienced view. (We must remember that Lady Lynne Shrimpleton was no stranger to the machinations of readers – should that be `buyers’? – of trashy but glossy magazines in the Hello mode.)

She was confident that she could afford to ignore all of the drivel which would be generated by people with single brain cells as a result.

More importantly, though, she realised that her crew and herself seemed to be completely in the clear at least so far: people in the pub were apparently too busy belatedly filming the aftermath of the abduction such as virile young Seth’s premature ejaculation of grape-shot as he penetrated the Snug’s ceiling with his shotgun, for instance.

It made cheap copy all over the planet when expressed in this way.

But obsessions with holes in ceilings and unconscious potential heroes meant that nobody seemed to have filmed herself or anyone else in the vicinity of the event.  That was a relief.

She was surprised, though, when her heart almost missed a beat as she then realised that there was no sign of Jay on any of the images either.

She wondered if she would ever see him again – and really hoped that she would. She fervently wished that he hadn’t left the boat earlier. She again sought the word she had searched for last night and wanted to express to him – but still couldn’t find it.

Lady Lynne sighed. Then she thought about Baban Singh Chopra and what she was going to do with him.

She then told herself that she needed to forget all about Soldier Jay; get her act together and concentrate.

The first thing she needed to do – urgently – was to chase-up `Threefeet of the Yard’ and see what he had been able to discover about Baban’s apparently former associates – if anything at all.

The very thought of talking to this idiot made her angry – as if James Churchill Proudfoot was the cause of all the mistakes she was beginning to understand she had made during the last couple of days…

—-

Even in a place as basically backward as Shrimpleton – perhaps particularly in a place as basically backward as Shrimpleton – news travels fast. And as we all know, bad news travels fastest of all…

So, even as Lady Lynne’s yacht travelled ever further away from them in a southerly direction, the stunned members of the Shrimpie Trust who had witnessed the abduction of Baban Singh Chopra in broad daylight – ok; by emergency lighting at night to be strictly accurate – were beginning to recover. Landlord Amos’ son Seth had been brought round: a jug of freezing cold water having been thrown in his face by Skip, who had seen unconscious team-mates revived in exactly such a way in a few football matches from the past. As he spluttered and then rubbed his head as he sat unsteadily on a chair by the fire and his dad plied him with whisky, some members of the Trust helped sweep-up the wreckage caused by his wayward gunshot; others restored their nerves with other sorts of shots – and `Babs’ (Barbara) took Zorba for a walk in the darkness, aware that the noxious, quite sulphurous smells which had been increasingly regularly emanating from the dog’s rear end had been indicating for some time that nature was calling the Labrador quite urgently.

“Amos!” said Skip, taking command as he did by habit, “Get the Shrimpleton Bugle on the phone! Tell them we’ve got an exclusive!”

“They’ll be shut, this time of night!” replied the Landlord without much enthusiasm. “Besides which, that rag is just a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream!”

“How do you mean?”

“It’s a front for every fraudster; UFO nutter and Big Brother lunatic from all over the planet!”

“What? – the local paper?”

“No! At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist myself – that’s just a front! The internet edition’s totally different! It tells us that Godzilla is real and being held captive by the FBI on an island somewhere with the last of the dinosaurs: Jurassic Park but for real. That aliens were hiding in the notorious Grassy Knoll in Dallas and actually assassinated President Kennedy! That agents of the state are everywhere and can be parachuted into our lives at the press of a button. They have an obsession about this sort of stuff. And other loony ideas: The Earth isn’t just flat; it’s thin too – drill too deeply and all the oceans will spill out into the void of space leaving us to all bake in permanent drought! Gravity isn’t real: it a force caused by an electro-magnet in the Moon. When it fails; we’re all done for! Keir Starmer and Nigel Farage aren’t androids – and other loopy-doopy nonsense too fanciful to even mention. How stupid can you get? It’s a proper Numpty’s Newsheet! Besides – what kind of newsman sits silently in the bar on his own staring at the latest drivel his loony-tune pals out there are filling his thick head with when there’s a full-blown crisis – complete with a gunshot – going on right under his nose?”

“But he’s all we’ve got!” said Skip.

Amos sighed a deep sigh. Skip was right – who else were they going to call? Ghostbusters?  Might as well for all the good the local rag would do them.

“Ok – I’ll get the editor in. But keep me out of it!”

Amos didn’t actually have to use his phone to get in contact with the island’s one and only newspaper. Because its Owner, Editor; Leader Writer; Sports Specialist and Local News Hound were already in the pub.

Having a team meeting? you might wonder.

No – that would mean a middle-aged man with a bald patch, thinning brownish-grey hair and a battered jacket with leather elbow patches would be talking to himself. Because the roles of Owner, Editor; Leader Writer; Sports Specialist and Local News Hound were all fulfilled by the same person: Freddy F Fazackerley.

“FFF” – Freddy `Fearless’ Fazackerley- prided himself on being the best that Fleet Street had ever produced.

(Not many people know that there is a Fleet Street on Cumberside Island but you can find it near Armada Terrace, just off Flotilla Street near the harbour where regular ferries still docked three times a week.)

Freddy `Fearless’ Fazackerley knew that the mainland press had little interest in him or his paper. FFF had been wiring them stories which he had painstakingly researched since its creation in 1997 on at least a daily basis. To no effect at all.

No – not even the blockbuster about the stolen bus shelters which had been an absolute sensation right across the island not all that long ago.

But now several hours after the Shrimpleton Arms had finally closed and he had retreated to his office, he knew he had a story of truly global significance on his hands. His acute journalistic senses were telling him – having heard what Skip and the other members of the Shrimpie Trust had to say – that he was sitting on a veritable goal mine. More importantly – as he started to count the massive royalties it would doubtlessly attract in his head – he realised it was an exclusive story he had to tell. He could sell it to the highest bidder for a proper fee. For once. All he had to do was write it, package it properly – and then the royalty payments would be pouring in from all over the planet…

Earlier, he had accepted Amos’ invitation and joined Skip and the rest of the Shrimpie Trust in the Snug, placed his phone on the table and taken a reporters’ notebook and a pen from his inside jacket pocket. He then settled everyone down and said:

“Reet! Now see here! We need to get this story straight, sithee? We need to create what we journalistas call a `cohesive picture’. No, not one tha’ might hang on the wall at home but what we also like to call a `narrative’.  So we’ll start with thee!”

So saying, he suddenly pointed at Roy, who reddened slightly. He didn’t feel comfortable talking in public. But before he had to, Freddy motioned him to silence and added:

“Hold on a sec…”

He leant forward and pressed the `record’ button on his phone before sitting back in his chair with his notebook and pen poised, ready to write down the grisly details of the evening –  just as they had happened, word-for-word.

“Shorthand?” asked Skip, clearly impressed by the Chief Reporter-come-Editor-come-Want Ads–come-Advertising Executive–come Feature Writer’s obvious professionalism.

Freddy looked vaguely offended.

“No!” he said. “I was just born like this! Me right foot’s slightly longer than me left as well if tha’ must know. That’s why Manchester United tore up me contract in 1992. Just think: Beckham; Scholes; the Nevilles… and Freddy F Fazackerley!”

He sat for a moment with a dreamy expression on his face before suddenly pulling himself together again.

“Reet!” he said once more “Let’s try a different approach. Anyone actually see the Stegosaurus?”

There was an awkward silence.

“Stegosaurus?” asked Skip, tentatively. “There was no Stegosaurus!”

“Shame!” said Freddy, looking disappointed. For as long as he could remember, he had fantasised about being the first living person to record the sighting of a live dinosaur somewhere on the planet. No matter. Unabashed, he continued:

“Oh! Well in that case: how many parachutists did tha’ see descending from the night sky – and what sort of weaponry did they have? Hold on…”

Clamping his tongue firmly between his teeth so that it stuck out as he squinted at his notebook with a pained expression of intense concentration, he began to mutter to himself as he wrote:

“Brian the Milk said he saw at least seven soldiers carrying what looked to the untutored eye to be probably Bren CZ 805 G Mark Ones – or possible the later variant 805 G Mark Twos…”

“Brian the Milk isn’t even here!” objected someone. “He’s at home in bed. Some of us have to get up early in the mornings, you know!”

Freddy swore under his breath.  He’d always wanted to be a foreign correspondent in a war zone – but realised that it’s a bit risky and his mum wouldn’t let him because he might get hurt. But he’d never understood why foreign powers didn’t do something less obvious than engage in a full-scale military conflict. Their nefarious aims could be achieved far more easily simply by invading a place where nobody would expect them to – like Cumberside Island. That’s what he would do. He sighed when he thought of the length of time he had spent hidden in deep undergrowth by the East Cliffs, endlessly scanning the skies with his binoculars; his longest telephoto lens already attached to his battered Zenith camera in a fruitless search for likely aircraft which might be transporting such assault troops to his very back door. What an exclusive that would be. It would be worth all the sacrifices he had made to pursue his craft. And what sacrifices they were…

For example – blimey! – those Gannets are mucky blighters! Day after fruitless day, he looked as if he had been pebble-dashed when he finally made his way home from the cliffs. His mum went ballistic. But that was just one of the many prices he was prepared to make in order to bring accurate versions of reality into ordinary people’s lives – whether they wanted them or not….

“Trust me!” he assured everyone in the pub. “Freddy `Fearless’ Fazackerley prides himself that he has never been known to twist the truth in any way to attempt to boost sales of any of the serious papers he has ever worked for. For me, this is a matter of particular personal pride…”

“Hold on!” said Babs, who by this time had returned with a very wet Zorba, who was loudly snoring (and still farting) as he steamed in front of the fire in the corner. “`Any of the serious papers’? You’ve only ever worked for the Shrimpleton Bugle – and that’s an absolute rag!”

“Yeah!” agreed Roy, who decided to speak after all of his own volition. “`Never been known to twist the truth’? How about the one about five-legged cows? Or Root and Mouth disease that you said only trees could catch?”

“Er – that were a typo!” admitted Freddy. “`Foot’ became `Root” and I didn’t have enough Tippex to change it so I just soldiered on…”

“The man-eating Molluscs of South Beach!” asked another voice.

“Martian nuns distilling Moonshine in the old Priory?” asked someone else.

“The Cumberside Island Space Programme?”

“Robotic Russian Puffins spying on Barrow’s submarine yards from Cumberside Head?”

“Interview with a Vampire? “ Irrefutable proof of an Afterlife at last!” if I remember the headline properly? What happened to that?”

“Well – he didn’t turn up!”

“Because he was dead!” yelled Amos from the bar, unable to control himself any longer. “What about the other rubbish you’ve put out there?”

“Rubbish?” repeated FFF, looking really oFFF-ended.

“Yes!” insisted Amos – Rubbish! How about the Cumberside Cure for Covid? Cancer? Constipation? Cystitis? Conjunctivitis – or anything else you could think of beginning with “C”?”

“OK – ok: enough already!” admitted Freddy. “It made money whilst it lasted! That’s not a crime is it? All reet – sometimes I have juiced things up a bit. Mebbe exaggerated here and there. But I promise, as long as he” (pointing at the slumbering Zorba) “Is my witness – I won’t add a single word about tonight’s little incident which isn’t strictly the truth and nothing but the whole truth – So help me Dog!”

But will Fearless Freddy be as good as his word? Find out in the next exclusive edition of

The Sensational Shrimpleton Saga…